What is ‘scientific’ about Marxism...

its just a bunch of bologna

From Bayesian statistics r
perspective, I've observed enough to change my neutral prior to "Marxism is shit".

I guess he followed the scientific method.
>observation
people are poor
>Hypothesis
Capitalism is at fault
>test
create a nation of poor people
>hypothesis rejected
repeat… with the exact same hypothesis for some reason.

>Pinochet loving libertarian
Please be saying this ironically
Read Marx and Marxist literature and critiques for yourself
Don't ask some Internet form that is constitute of mostly autistic undergrads who like Chinese cartoon porn more than science to inform you about Marxism
Lit will tell you what to read. If you are going to start reading about socialism you should start with Proudhon: what is property? By no means Marxist but it's a good way to set the table
It's not just prescriptive, it's doctrinal bullshit on the same terms with liberal democracy. That's not saying Marx does not make some important points, especially in capital.
The people who took Marx as a doctrine and called themselves Marxist ruined what could have been an actual socialist revolution(not the arbitrary political kind)

Pinochet proved that freedom can be gotten through dictatorship (so long as you're not a communist).

Brain dead

According to Popper falsifiability is the standard of what constitutes something as a scientific statement/subject. If you really want to adhere strictly by that standard obviously all of economics is unscientific since noting is formulated in a falsifiable manner, try "falsifying" a supply and demand curve, it's formulated in such a way you can't falsify it... it's a tautological truism and if you point out we might not be approaching an equilibrium, or that economic development might not be about equilibration but chaos dynamics, the response you'll always get is the free market is being interfered with.

Not everything worthwhile can necessarily be formulated in a falsifiable manner like Popper thought. Darwinism isn't presented in a falsifiable manner since that's not the way you would approach the notion of evolution. In the 19th century scientists weren't concerned about falsifiability and that lead to grand theorisations. Marxism is "scientific" in the same sense as say palaeontological theories are "scientific".

youtube.com/watch?v=VExVaR8S_wQ&t=198s

>try "falsifying" a supply and demand curve, it's formulated in such a way you can't falsify it... it's a tautological truism and if you point out we might not be approaching an equilibrium, or that economic development might not be about equilibration but chaos dynamics, the response you'll always get is the free market is being interfered with.
t. someone who never studied economics

Economic theories are intentionally formulated in a way intended to make them unfalsifiable. Mainstream economics rests on a non-falsifiable preconceived notion of human agency where everyone is rationally maximizing their utility by carefully calculating their opportunity costs for everything simultaneously so we are guaranteed to arrive at the best of all possible worlds. It's not that the theories aren't inconsistent it's just not empirically true.

I had a teen socialist phase where I read pretty much all socialist literature (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Mendel, Stalin, Mao, Luxembourg, etc). The first few chapters of the first book of Kapital are worthwhile, after that he repeats himself ad nauseum. Grundrisse and most other works are quite boring. His theses on Feuerbach or w/e its called is interesting for his atheistic philosophy. His economic texts are pretty descriptive. The manifesto is indeed prescriptive. Lenin's essay on materialism and Engel's book on dialectical materialism are quite interesting; mainly in a historical
and thought-experiment kind of sense because most of the science is plain wrong. This stuff is all on the Marxist online internet archive. I personally reject 90% of it, and think Marx failed to grasp supply and demand, the contribution of entrepreneurship toward wealthy in society, genetic differences in aptitude and drive, the possibility of mixed economies, the importance of price signals and decentralization, the connection between economics and sexual competition, the clash of self-interest and utilitarianism, etc. He was still a smart guy and an original thinker.

I've noticed that "back then" things that were just Studies or general inquiries were called science, I think it had a more general meaning in ye olden days

>genetic differences in aptitude and drive,

If you are just curious start with Terry Eagleton's Why Marx was Right. It's basically the easiest book on Marxism there is, and while it softpedels a lot of the hard political stuff, it will at least make the arguement that even if Marx isn't right, the points and critiques he makes are worth taking seriously. Alex Callincos' The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx will give it to you from the perspective of an activist, rather than an academic.

If you want a basic take on his view of economics Mandel's Introduction to Marxist Economics is very short and good.

Other than that, if you want to read Marx, orderwise I'd say;
Pt. I of the German Ideology, he lays out the basics of his theory of history, something which will be foundational for everything afterwords.

Wage Labour and Capital, is an easy first pass at his economics.

I personally think there is nothing in the communist manifesto that isn't better said else where, but i guess for its historical value read that.

The Preface of Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy reiterates his materialist view of history.

Then Capital. Make sure you get the penguin editions. While for most Philosophy Penguin is the last place you want to go, their Marx collection is made of new translations which are regarded as by far the best in English.
Capital is not nearly as difficult as people make it out to be, it's just long. The first few chapters aren't the easiest but after that it's really not a bad read.

If you need help along:

Ben Fine's Marx's Capital

Michel Heinrich's An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Capital

The YouTube Lectures from David Harvey on Capital.

Rubin's Essays on the Labour Theory of Value and Brunhoff's Marx on Money are great for those particularly difficult bits in Marx's Theory.

and as a further note, the first three chapters of capital are so hard going some would suggest you skip them until you've finished reading the rest of it!

kapitalism101 has a good video series on Value, which is what those chapters try and explain

The heritability of IQ is negligible in early childhood and rises to up to 80% in adulthood. There was a paper examining thousands of SNPs in human DNA, and it found that if you extrapolated the pattern to the full human genome, it would account for something like 55% of variability in IQ. People with schizophrenia have been found in studies to have family members who are extremely successful in business etc. Dopamine and other neurotransmitter/hormone levels are determined by both environmental and genetic factors, and implicated in whether you are a selfish status-hungry go-getter, or a laid back altruistic person who prefers to have a work-life balance. Tendency toward criminality has been found to have a genetic component (or at least early developmental component) through examining life-histories of twins adopted by different families. Of course there is an environmental component, but any genetic component to these kinds of traits will produce differences in outcomes, which has implications for economic behaviour.

"Science" has changed meanings in the last few hundred years. The "science" that Marx and Engels speak of is the same science that is portrayed in pic related, which is a page in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, in which he tries to categorize the various fields of knowledge, i.e. the sciences.

"Scientific" socialism is in contrast to some of the other veins of socialism that were popular in the mid 19th century. There was luddite socialism, romantic socialism, and other socialist movements that did not try to prove their beliefs rigorously through philosophy. Just like any well-reasoned argument will eventually take over a backless assertion, the so-called "scientific" socialism of Marx and Engels became the most popular form of socialism.

>You can be free unless you can't

>Mainstream economics rests on a non-falsifiable preconceived notion of human agency where everyone is rationally maximizing their utility by carefully calculating their opportunity costs for everything simultaneously so we are guaranteed to arrive at the best of all possible worlds.
yes 110 years ago. please don't talk about things you clearly have little knowledge of.

>thread about Marxism on Veeky Forums
>contains actual levelheaded discussion of the subject matter
I never thought I'd live to see the day

The communist manifesto was a pamphlet designed for barely literate peasants and factory workers, it by no means gives you a proper insight into Marxist thought. Das kapital is pretty thorough but imo trotskys work is more concise.
I'm not a Marxist, but there's a hell of a lot more depth to it than 'dae le stupid socialists??'

Not necessarily doubting you explicitly but I would like to read those studies.

The problem with dialectical materialism:

You can take any two "status'" of groups in society and posit a dialectical exchange between both of them. The problem is that there is no "scope" to prevent over determination, and self-validation, of DM.

I think Marx thought he had a magic bullet for the analysis of systems (DM) rather than taking each analysis on the terms of its subjects.

Well I should've said "one, out of many, problem with DM (dialectical materialism)"

Another problem is the disdain for any sort of empiricism. Hegel thought, on the basis of his logomania, that there could not be such a thing as a Kuiper belt between Mars and Jupiter. Because DM can turn up any result if you interpret the procedure in the favor of predetermined notions.

Sorry, Kuiper is for objects outside our main solar system (but which are still pulled by solar gravity).

He didn't think anything could be between Mars and Jupiter because literal numberphilia meme magic. Another victory for DM!

:^)

very informative and easy to digest. Thank you very much.

Heritability of IQ increased with age:
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23919982

Swedish adoption study of criminality:
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4009388/

SNP analysis of IQ:
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3182557/

Two other more recent studies, the first of which looked at genetics of extremely high IQ individuals (170IQ+):
nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp2017121a.html?foxtrotcallback=true
nature.com/ng/journal/v49/n7/full/ng.3869.html

Some schizophrenia discussion:
psychneuro.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/evolutionary-advantage-to-schizophrenia/

Acetylcholine receptor gene mutation tied to leadership ability:
ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0113/15012013-leadership-genetics
(acetylcholine is what e.g. nicotine affects)

Das Kapital was also meant for factory workers though :^)

I really don't think Marx, or any sociologist really, is scientific, unless they use actually science, particularly biology, to explain a human behavior. Sociology is cool and all, but it is not at all scientific.

Do you take pride in not even trying to understand things?

>FREEDOM AINT FREE

There are some great responses here, thank you all for that. Not OP, but was once interested in political philosophy. Lost interest but found this thread serving as a sufficient refresher to what was once common knowledge to me. Considering taking up some reading in the subject given the current state of politics in america. Any economic textbook suggestions? I already have all of what you'd consider political ~classics~ from when I was interested as a teen; I'd like some modern economic supplementary reading to further my conception of field and find a conclusion regarding marx. thanks

until the definition of communist is adapted to include anyone the state doesn't like

face it, you're not a libertarian if you support a state that censors any area of its peoples beliefs

...

No. From Marx, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people".

I'm not him and I don't understand dialectical materialism though so I can't really explain it any better than he did

Veeky Forums is center or leans to the right. Extremism doesn't belong here.

>t. read the communist manifesto and marx's article on wikipedia

fedora edgelord

read das kapital. if you're german, russian or greek read vaziulin.

also, the people in this thread haven't actually read marx. this is the only thing posted that provides a semi-accurate simplistic analysis of marx's methodology. if you want to learn about marxism, you're gonna have to study it the same way you study any other science

>anything that threatens the status quo is "extremism"

you're not the sharpest tool in the shed, are you user?

>you're gonna have to study it the same way you study any other science
The reason I initially left philosophy was because it lacked the rigor and completeness that the harder sciences contained. From what I did read, marxism wasn't a "science", rather it was a theoretical framework in a field that really has no room for theory.

>Popper stated his shit can’t be falsified and hence is comparable to astrology (along with psychoanalysis)
did this retard prove his statement?

>I am a Pinochet loving lolbertarian
Stop embarrassing the rest of us libertarians for fucks sakes man

BROTHER!

It's not scientific. It is a pseudoscience (when considered in that lens) but it has more nuance and credibility than pretty much any other political/philosophical/economic thought. Which often amount to someone taking a desire of theirs and building a weak system of justification for it, then treating it all as obvious truth. With resulting ideologues throwing inane shit at each other for centuries after.

>Marxism
Kill yourself
>Popper
Seriously kill yourself

Yes, Hegelian Dialectic and Dialectical Materialism are useless cancer. They pretty much amount to methods of dressing up a random, near-baseless opinion as an insightful and reasonable conclusion.

No.
Extremism = idealism that ignores reality, especially all facets of reality (easy to take a couple random facts and ignore the whole).

because bourgeoisie academia doesn't actually teach marxism. i've been studying marx for 3 years now, and i know people who have been studying him for 30. you should really read his work if you want to study him, not some bullet points in a power point presentation your postmodernist professor shows you.

but marxism is the only dialectical materialist methodology for the study of history and political economy. neoliberalism is idealist, because it makes a priori assumptions to justify the current status quo

bourgeois*

i really wish knowledge of marx in scientific circels came from actually reading marx instead of lolbertarian "counterarguments". someone pointed out that the method of abstraction is not easily shown to be true and this is a valid criticism and the only valid criticism out there. saying marx is "out of touch with reality" (while his entire method is examining the reality of social relations and the relations to the menas of production) is really fucking stupid and no one would take seriously any 19yo chem/cs undergrad spouting that shit. like the unfortunate brainlet over here: . marxism is first of all a historicism and this is a really important property. it's actually liberalism that's the weltanshauung making strange assumptions about the "civilized west" and the "normalcy" of private property and so on.

please educate yourself

I don't think it constitutes a valid criticism, but rather the restrictions in the definition of "science" used by bourgeois academia. the notion that you have to validate your scientific findings by applying them anew is irrational when it comes to the study of history and political science. Marx's scientific studies were all based on the study of the material conditions that lead to capitalism, the study of how material conditions shaped society. Like any scientist, he used facts in order to discover laws governing the subject he was studying.

Probably preaching to the choir anyway, you sound like the only other person here who has actually read Marx. Frankly it's sad to see how uneducated people in STEM are when it comes to anything outside their field. Even my supervising professor, who's a renounced scientist in our field, doesn't have the slightest clue when it comes to political economy or the study of history.

>rather the restrictions in the definition of "science" used by bourgeois academia

well yeah, but i mean in the epistemological sense. as in where our knowledge originates. when you're using the method of historical materialism, you need to understand it doesn't provide the entire truth and this sometimes has repercussions as to the broadness of validit y of the claims you're making.

for example: franz fannon stresses many times how being a person is tyed to a certain sense of belonging, not just in terms of class, but in terms of race. and again how race is not just race itself but also a class. in this way, even post-modernism, intersectionalism and so on are not disjunct with HM.

but yeah i agree completely with what you're saying. what's your field? i'm in solid state physics and there's a professor with gramsci quotes in his office which i thought was pretty rad.

>when you're using the method of historical materialism, you need to understand it doesn't provide the entire truth and this sometimes has repercussions as to the broadness of validit y of the claims you're making

as with any scientific discovery. historical materialism is simply a framework in which you study society with scientific methodology and attempt to discover laws governing it's progress, just like you would in any other field. It doesn't mean your discoveries are absolute, nor holy scripture, because that's not what science does. But until further scientific study evolves your theories and models, it is the forefront of the scientific study of the subject.

>franz fannon stresses many times how being a person is tyed to a certain sense of belonging, not just in terms of class, but in terms of race. and again how race is not just race itself but also a class. in this way, even post-modernism, intersectionalism and so on are not disjunct with HM

But that's not done using scientific methodology. Making an a priori assumption and then trying to align history with your own assumption to prove your assumption correct isn't scientific methodology, nor did Marx ever do this. Marx started out as an idealist, and worked painstakingly his way up to dialectical materialism through countless hours of research of the particular subject. That is the difference between Marxism and a priori garbage postmodernists (and between marxism and his contemporary enlightenment philosophers). You cannot compare something as factual as classes with idealist concepts like race. A person's relationship with the means of production and his alienation towards his own relationship with the fruits of his labor are observable facts. Race on the other hand is an unscientific concept, that can however be explained when put into historical context.

>what's your field?
neurobiology

The human body is full of dark energy, when you blink, you waste enough energy that could fully recharge an iPhone - Aristotle (phd in quantum mechanics, winner of 9 nobel prizes)

The great mystery of humanity is gravity, I always wondered why only the earth pulls objects, why does everything just floats on mar's or moon's surface? Are we the center of the universe? - Isac Neutron

Atomic bombs are smaller than an atom, even so the energy inside it is so big it could explode the entire universe. J. Roberto Hamster

The sun is so far away it would take 8 yeara to reach it at the speed of power. - Alfredo Estime

I know everything, from dark matter to quantum skeletons, but I'm not allowed to reveal it. - mystery scientist.

>idealist concepts like race

race might be an idealist concept, but only an idealist concept while it's an ideological concept. science is (at least according to althusser) the precces of replacing ideological concepts by scientific ones. idk if "race" can be completely reimagined as a scientific concept, but fannon at least points in the direction of looking at the liberal conception of race -- by this is mean the conception inherited by colonialism. this is the same process marx underwent as he reconsidered his hegelian background in "the german ideology".

>nonscientific concept, that can however be explained

i wrote the things above before re-reading this part. i think that race can be understood as a historical concept, ie. a scientific concept and that fannon has important developments towards that, but i haven't read that much of him to be able to sufficiently explain how and why, other than considering the joint history of capitalism and colonialism.

>Marxism
>scientific

It's almost like it resulted in mass genocide, starvation, and outright failure every single time its been applied. It's almost like the same Marxist intellectuals realized themselves that Marxism failed when applied to the rich/poor because of the stupid levels of wealth in the western world in the 20th century.

this
> Holodomor (muh Stalin was a good man)
> Gulag (muh Facism is evil and communism is good)
> Venezuela, Vietnam, Cuba, nork and Russia (muh socialism works it just hasn’t been implemented correctly)

>They claimed on the societal level this would produce a communist revolution due to the profit motive of capitalism making people miserably exploited and poor, and the reduced rate of profit due to an increase in fixed capital costs (and hence less relative profit from exploiting workers) creating financial instability.
This is accurate, but it seems like the Marxist appropriation of the Hegelian dialectic fails to acknowledge the new phase of thesis and antithesis promulgated by such a state. Sure, unsatisfied workers will revolt en masse, but once a communist government is established and all of its inadequacies are apparent (as is with any form of governance), what then is the new counter-process? What synthesis will that lead to?

Or did they literally assume that a Marxist utopia was societal perfection?

althusser was a post-modernist fraud that never actually read marx. your dichotomy of ideology and science being separate isn't scientific at all, ideology can be scientific.

>holodomor
complete falsehood, never happened, no proof it did

>gulag

gulags were work camps where people served time instead of going to prison. By working instead of being closed in a cell, they were reintroduced in society through the comradery they experienced during labour that benefited society as a whole. this system actually aimed at reintroducing social outcasts back into society, and most people simply served terms of a few years and were released when their time was served. Now contrast this to modern US slave prisons, where prisoners labour so that the owner of the privately owned prison can make profit while the prisoner gets nothing.

>venezuela

you're completely misinformed about venezuela, due to the widespread propaganda effort in order to justify the coming invasion. the truth about venezuela is that it's not a socialist state, but what they did do was kick US oil companies out of their country and nationalize the oil industry. This is why the US is funding fascist groups to organize protests and wages such a misinformation campaign on US citizens. You mongs will eat up anything you see on tv. This is the exact same psy-ops tactics the CIA used in guatemala, you can even find the manual they trained the contras with that clearly advises them to organize fake protests with as many casualties as possible etc.

>Vietnam
Vietnam hasn't been socialist since they introduced capitalist reforms in the 80s

>Cuba
Cuba's living standards are astronomically higher compared to it's shithole neighboring capitalist countries and compared to how it was before the revolution

>DPRK
most of what you hear about the DPRK is propaganda, simply because the country is too closed off for western sources to actually be able to know what's going on. cont

>althusser was a post-modernist

goddam bro he was a structuralist

your reply is really sad, but you seem to be a ML so i guess that figures

the study of the contradictions in early socialism is the current forefront in marxist analysis user, you have no idea how spot on your question is. for the dialectic of the internal contradictions of early socialism and the dialectic that will lead to late socialism, i suggest studying vaziulin. problem is his books have only been translated from russian to greek and german.

cont.

Most sources on the DPRK are either complete made up bullshit, propaganda from south korean puppet state agencies or oral testimonies from paid defectors who make a career out of it. What you can research however is the current state of south korea, and how their citizens have one of the highest suicide rates on the planet, are heavily protesting us occupation and have been ruled by us imposed dictators since the korean war.

>russia

the ussr was a medieval shithole filled with illiterate peasants before ww1, with famines and pogroms being commonplace, and became the first country to explore space in 40 years time while shouldering a 20 million death toll and billions of infrastructural damage during ww2. while the production ran on marxist principles, it was the fastest developing economy in the world. you can also do a bit of research and see how the victory of counter-revolution and the following capitalist restoration resulted in a tremendous drop in the quality of life and even in food shortages that hadn't been an issue since ww2. in 1993 people went to the streets to protest yeltsin and his corrupt government, but the revolts were crushed with 10.000 victims as a result (something the western media applauded).

>he was a structuralist

he literally admitted he never read capital user. he is taught in neoliberal faculties along with foucault.

>you seem to be a ML so i guess that figures

i don't like branding myself as such because i find MLs highly dogmatic when it comes to studying the ussr and its internal contradictions

cont

but in no way does that make hacks like althusser or trotsky valid scientists.

Imagine an island with two nuclear families. One family fishes, the other farms mangoes. Each day they meet at a trading point. In the natural world, they meet and haggle until they agree on a trade that seems fair to both parties. Adam Smith's hidden hand encourages them to innovate and make things like ladders and nets so they have more surplus to trade. Marx plants a demon at the trading point, who forces the families to trade each day against their will. The value of their produce is dictated solely by how much labor was spent collecting it. Unlike with haggling, there's actually an incentive for cheating. The family that farms mangoes can burn their ladders, so that their mangoes are worth more, so that they receive more fish in return for one mango, while they have an abundance of mangoes left on the trees. Likewise, the fishermen can burn their nets, so that they don't over-fish, assuming the lower yield can be traded for lots of mangoes.

Marx = anti-human = green.

Science is verisimilitude by its very nature.

Read Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism if you want a complete overview of the roots of socialism from philosophy, passing through utopian socialism, scientific socialism and then its actual implementation.

Or, like in the real world the family with the fish is sick to death of mangoes and don't want many of them, vice versa with the mango family. Only fools trade outside of what the market will bear.

>he literally admitted he never read capital
can i have a source for thsi? i googled this and i found only a bunch of argumentless hatepieces but nothing about althusser, the author of "reading capital" and always loud about having to "return to marx", not reading marx

it's all in his memoir, The Future Lasts Forever.

here are some funny snippets i found in a post

>"In fact, my philosophical knowledge of texts was rather limited. I [...] knew a little Spinoza, nothing about Aristotle, the Sophists and the Stoics, quite a lot about Plato and Pascal, nothing about Kant, a bit about Hegel, and finally a few passages of Marx."

>"I had another particular ability. Starting form a simple turn of phrase, I thought I could work out (what an illusion!), if not the specific ideas of an author or a book I had not read, at least their general drift or direction. I obviously had certain intuitive powers as well as a definite ability for seeing connections, or a capacity for establishing theoretical oppositions, which enabled me to reconstruct what I took to be an author's ideas on the basis of the authors to whom he was opposes. I proceed spontaneously drawing contrasts and distinctions, subsequently elaborating a theory to support this."

he was hospitalized and suffered heavy simptoms of mental illness.... i doubt what he thought at that point can be taken seriously. he also claimed he read "a little" of spinoza despite having shown to be an expert on the subject previously. same with hegel. idk what you're on about.....

Well this becomes more and more irrelevant with more families. Left unchecked, the market continues growing. The labor theory of value actually checks the growth artificially. It's almost as if everything he wrote was designed to cull as many humans as possible.

It's a fact that Marx called for the genocide of all blacks and every culture that wasn't yet Capitalist. When you use the term Marxism, it could mean this, or it could mean what liberals think it means, or what economic theorists think it means.

he had been in and out of the nuthouse since 47. you're nitpicking his writings when the man himself admitted he was a hack.

>Marx called for the genocide
citation needed

>Well this becomes more and more irrelevant with more families.

I was trying to stay in the confines of the original thought experiment. Yes, with enough people there's always enough people wanting a product to make it worth selling. However, the statement of, "Only fools trade outside of what the market will bear," still holds true. The "market" unto itself can't grow beyond the people.

the DPRK is shit.

>complete falsehood, never happened, no proof it did

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor#Cover-up_of_the_famine

>By working instead of being closed in a cell, they were reintroduced in society through the comradery they experienced during labour that benefited society as a whole.

hahahahahaha... My mates grandfather went to a gulag for several years after returning from WWII due to accusations of him being a German spy. You don't know what you're talking about

> This is why the US is funding fascist groups to organize protests and wages such a misinformation campaign on US citizens.

Is that why there's a shortage of toilet paper and food in the 21st century in an oil rich nation? Is that why Maduro dissolved parliament? I guess all those hundreds of thousands of people protesting are all US agents. I'll trust you on this one, my leftist friend from Venezuela must be an agent as well.

>Cuba's living standards are astronomically higher compared to it's shithole neighboring capitalist countries and compared to how it was before the revolution

Have you been to Cuba? I have. Even the tourist hotels are in a disgusting state. I've spoken with ordinary people there, and while they dislike the US embargo, they certainty aren't very happy with their government.

>most of what you hear about the DPRK is propaganda, simply because the country is too closed off for western sources to actually be able to know what's going on.

Ok so the starving farmers who flee into China who tell of labour camps are also agents? You can look at videos of people on sanctioned visits to North Korea, and even the privileged people in Pyongyang are emaciated.

cont.

cont

>you can also do a bit of research and see how the victory of counter-revolution and the following capitalist restoration resulted in a tremendous drop in the quality of life and even in food shortages that hadn't been an issue since ww2. in 1993 people went to the streets to protest yeltsin and his corrupt government, but the revolts were crushed with 10.000 victims as a result (something the western media applauded).

The transition was done very poorly and did result in oligarchs gaining power. However the current living standard is way higher than before. I have numerous Russian friends who tell me this, I've been to numerous Russian cities, and my family has been to the Soviet union. My grandmother used to travel to St Petersburg to barter blue jeans, lipstick, and rubber boots for caviar, vodka, etc, making a killing in the process because of the massive lack of consumer goods in the USSR. She told me that once a Russian friend invited her over and showed off his radio. He asked, how many months wages does a radio cost in your country, and how many months do you wait to pick it up? When he heard that you could walk into a store and buy a radio for a weeks wage in a capitalist country, he was depressed for the rest of the evening.

What I'm trying to convey is that you have all the theoretical knowledge in the world, but it seems like you have little exposure to how socialism has ACTUALLY played out in practice.

>providing wikipedia as a source

opinion disregarded

>my mates father's great grand aunt once saw a gulag

your empirical anecdotes don't constitute historical fact

>Is that why there's a shortage of toilet paper and food in the 21st century in an oil rich nation? Is that why Maduro dissolved parliament? I guess all those hundreds of thousands of people protesting are all US agents. I'll trust you on this one, my leftist friend from Venezuela must be an agent as well.

again user, venezuela isn't socialist. get it through your thick head, their problems stem exactly from capitalism. they simply nationalized the oil industry. and yes, the "hundreds of thousands" aka hundreds of protesters are organized by groups funded by the US, exactly like they did in fucking guatemala.

>Ok so the starving farmers who flee into China who tell of labour camps are also agents? You can look at videos of people on sanctioned visits to North Korea, and even the privileged people in Pyongyang are emaciated.

the defectors are paid to create dramatic stories by south korean agencies. their stories are never consistent.

and yes there are food shortages in the country, due to the sanctions imposed by the imperialist aggressors.

>However the current living standard is way higher than before

see once again, your gramma's anecdotes don't constitute historical facts. it's akin to arguing that global warming is a myth because today was a cold day. if you look at factual statistics, you will see that during the years of the ussr there was 0 unemployment and everyone was guaranteed a home, a job, education, healthcare and paid vacations. Today, russians live miserably. You should look into the actual statistics, not your grandmas stories

Yes, I agree, but unchecked the people grows.

>racial trash
youtube.com/watch?v=UmI7_SWBUK4

Watch "Under the Sun" on Netflix.

>you're completely misinformed about venezuela
Actually you are. 80% of the population is poor, and thousands are escaping to Brazil.

I'm Brazilian and talked to several refugees, they surely hate Maduro, and they say many people are starving, low food supplies and one of the highest murder rate of America.

Do you really think all the refugees CIA plants?

>educate yourself from shows on netflix

again, anecdotal stories and mouth-to-mouth opinions mean nothing. half the population in the us thinks the 2008 economic crisis was due to mexicans, that doesn't really mean anything

It's a documentary where no word is said, so you can make your own conclusions.

You can confirm the facts on

>anecdotal stories and mouth-to-mouth opinions mean nothing
sure thing bro! All that matters is Maduro's provided documents and commie news sources

> half the population in the us thinks the 2008 economic crisis was due to mexicans
Source?

from what i read on wikipedia (correct me if im wrong), they show that the DPRK authorities want them to create a propaganda film. is that it or is there more to it than that?

all that matters is facts. in my country the neonazis have 5% in the parliament, which means 5% of the population literally believes the jews are at fault for everything. would you take their word for it?

>source
us elections

>all that matters is facts
So you're saying thousands of Venezuelans running out of their country isn't a fact?

Do a simple research and you'll see it's a well known fact.

i'm not saying that at all. i'm saying that their economy is crashing due to the drop in oil prices, on which their country heavily depended and i'm also saying that the us companies along with the local bourgeoisie are making an organized propaganda effort in order to blame the social programs the government provided to the villager productions as responsible, by funding unrest and protests. if you honestly believe that the oil getting privatized would actually help venezuela's workers, you're extremely delusional

>propaganda effort in order to blame the social programs
So the oil depended social programs failed due to the drop in price, and you're saying it's just capitalist propaganda?

but the price drop did occur due to sanctions user. it is a gross mismanagement on their part, basing their economy on oil at that level, but it's not the "socialist" aspect of it that's at fault. this argument is ridiculous since venezuela isn't socialist to begin with, they simply kicked us companies out. no matter what happens, the oil being privatized only helps the us bourgeoisie and their local affiliates and not the people.

Not even a Marxist but you are a fucking moron. What some one does with information says nothing about it's truth value. As well, there is a big difference between Marxism as a method for looking at history and political economy and how it develops and the myriad social movements who have used such analysis to justify themselves and their quest for power. Please hang yourself form the neck until dead you unfathomably retarded person.

I never mentioned Marxism when speaking of extremism, you pathetic ideologues.